Gadgets

My "workbench"

My order from Maker Shed arrived today, some wiring, a mini breadboard, and a protoshield kit.  From the product description, it’s not super apparent that it comes unassembled, but when I opened the box I found that was indeed the case.  I’d been planning to learn to solder eventually, so it wasn’t a huge deal, but this did accelerate my learning a bit!

I had to run to my parent’s house for dinner anyways, so I took the opportunity to pick up my dad’s old soldering iron, solder, and third hand, and proceeded to learn to solder by watching various YouTube videos on the subject.  Once I felt I had the gist of it, I broke out the protoshield and got to work, following the instructions here.

At the start of the project, all those pins seemed pretty intimidating, but once I’d soldered in the first couple without incident, I gained some confidence and was able to chew through them pretty quickly.  I was surprised by how nice (at least to my untrained eye) most of my connections turned out!  I tested a few with my multimeter just to make sure everything went as planned.

When the moment of truth arrived, I fit the protoshield on top of the Arduino, plugged in a couple LEDs, since the controller was still programmed with my scrolling LED sketch, and plugged it in.  Sure enough, all three LEDs worked as advertised, blinking merrily away.  With the protoshield stacked on the Arduino, you have a nice, compact package to prototype circuits, without needing to wire up a separate breadboard.  Now that I’ve cleared this hurdle, my next step will be to work on making the controller send a trigger signal to my Paul C. Buff Cybersync CST flash trigger, which I can then use to fire my strobes wirelessly.  After that, I’ll work on hooking up my sensors and making them fire the flash.  Progress is being made!

The newly assembled protoshield atop my Arduino